


Ezra Makes Out

by Meduseld



Category: The Magnificent Seven (TV)
Genre: Allusions to period typical homophobia, Ambiguity, Card Games, Ezra just has a lot of feels and issues, Feelings, First Time, Just let Josiah love you, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-01
Updated: 2020-02-01
Packaged: 2021-02-25 17:06:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22499533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meduseld/pseuds/Meduseld
Summary: Sometimes a losing hand is the one you need to win.
Relationships: Josiah Sanchez/Ezra Standish
Kudos: 11





	Ezra Makes Out

Against the windowpanes, still new and shiny as it ever got out West, the rain came down like a song.

It was cozy now, in the not quite church, the holes in the roof patched by Josiah’s careful hands. The man himself was in front of Ezra, imposing in the way a good clergyman should be.

An image that was instantly ruined by the deck of cards fanned out between them. 

Ezra was losing, so far. Which meant that, all in all, he was winning, from Josiah’s contented sprawl and easy grin. 

Hard to share an enclosed space with a sore loser, that he knew from experience. They were alone, and that was unlikely to change if the rain kept coming down. Even brawlers and gunmen liked to stay out of the wet. 

Just the way Ezra wanted it, if he was honest. And he never was. Not really. He couldn’t say that he’d planned it, exactly, either, but he usually never did. 

Life was about taking opportunities when you found them and a true gambler knew half of the job was keeping a sharp eye open for them. 

He wasn’t in the church by design or by chance. Or in the town itself, for that matter. 

“Got a worrying gleam in that eye, Ezra” Josiah rumbles, sounding more amused than anything. Likely just as happy as suspicious about his lucky streak. 

They weren’t playing for money, a concession Ezra had long since imagined he would give and appeared to grudgingly grant. Josiah had wanted to play for wishes, hopes, prayers. Ezra had laughed. 

First, it had been knickknacks, wood chips left around from the repair work in the church, spare bullets. Which had been part one of the not-plan, patience being essential to part two. 

The rain helped, coming down in the particular New Mexico Territory way, great thundering buckets that did nothing for the lingering afternoon heat. Easy enough to get him to acquiesce to playing for the shirts off their backs, next. 

“Not that anything quite so fit and fine would be of much use to me,” Josiah had laughed and Ezra had smiled easily back. If he had his way, and he usually did, Josiah would find that wasn’t so. He wanted that, at any rate. But he didn’t hope.

That was one of the first of his mother’s many lessons. And one of the most useful.

"Worrying? I certainly hope I have never given you cause to worry," he says with a gold-toothed smile. Josiah gives him a flat look, weakened by the amused gleam in his eye, and then smiles back. 

"It's unlike you to lose, Ezra, and to take it so well. Unless, of course, you only seem to be losing," Josiah says, looking at the cards. 

Funny, Ezra had run circles around the world's best card players, but he had never found anyone harder to read than Josiah right then. He could have been hewn from wood. Or at least more so than usual, his statuesque face dropping the 'esque'. 

There was really only one thing to do. Make the bait obvious and see if he bit. 

"Now I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about," he drawls, thickening his accent to rival any cotillion-trained Southern belle, leaning back to give Josiah as best a view of his bare chest as possible just slightly angled to hide a few unsightly scars. Even he hadn’t managed to stay unblemished after so many years in the West. 

His eyes go dark, but Ezra doesn't know if it's with lust or censure. He’ll find out soon, one way or the other. 

Josiah’s hands fold under his chin, echoing his prayers. 

People less adept at reading their fellow man, the way Ezra is, might think Josiah is stupid or at least slow-witted. Ezra knows he’s considering, maybe even calculating, and almost as adept as he himself is at looking at a man and seeing him laid out like the table of contents in a book. 

He remembers his little finishing school and smiles. The girls had taught him things too.

“Something wrong, Mr. Sanchez?” he adds, lifting his eyebrows the way they did when they wanted a John to see nothing but them. 

Josiah frowns at him now and Ezra cools. Maybe it was a mistake after all. 

“I can’t see the angle you can” he rumbles, glancing up under the ridge of his brows, like he’s hoping Ezra will straighten up and laugh and explain, “I just can’t see why you’re doing this”. 

“Which part?” Ezra says, running his fingers idly along his chest, trying to look languid instead of calculating, nipples starting to toughen up. "Me, I suppose. Can't be that bored, even with this rain," he says, looking Ezra right in the eyes at last. 

His favorite feature, if he's honest. Josiah can look right into the soul of a man, when he wants. They're plain beautiful, too. 

“I would say you’re a lot of things, but boring isn’t one of them” which of course, is true. Sometimes that’s the best way to lie. 

“Don’t do that, Ezra. Not now. Speak plain” Josiah says, voice unreadable. He’s asking a lot. Maybe too much. But sometimes you have to put up or shut up. 

“What I want right now is to know you, in a biblical sense, and that was a want that came before this rain,” he answers, trying to sound serene. 

Too saucy and Josiah will take it as a joke, to serious and he might spook. 

Or get mean, but that seems unlikely to Ezra. Josiah is the type to hate the sin, not the sinner. And Lord knows the six men he rides with have done plenty of sinning. 

Ezra’s gamble pays off, the way it usual does. Josiah smiles small and sweet. 

“I’d say we two are of one mind, then”, he says and gathers Ezra’s face in those huge bear paws, as careful as he always is. 

It makes his blood rise up to the surface, being treated like this, as if he’s delicate and precious. Even if they are sprawled on the floor of an unfinished and unconsecrated church, the sawdust digging at Ezra’s back. 

He must make some noise, some little moue that would fit perfectly in a Georgia parlor but stick out in the rough West, because Josiah moves his lips to Ezra’s neck and his colossal hands to the backs of Ezra’s thighs to lift him up like he weighs nothing at all. 

His ankles lock at the small of Josiah’s back, without even a token protest of not being this kind of girl. It wouldn’t ring true, even if he were a girl. 

Josiah bears them both to the small cot he keeps at the back, the fact that he fits on it one of God’s own miracles. When it does not break at the weight of them, even with an almighty groan from the wood, Ezra thinks God can add another to the tally. 

There’s no reason not to take their time. Even this close, the sound of the rain and roaring water in the street is almost as loud as their breath. 

Nowhere to go but here. And it’s a smoother road than Ezra had thought. 

Men tended to be too rough or too soft for him. Josiah is the improbable middle ground, without any of the hesitation or self-hate of the others that came before. 

Ezra’s late to the joke, what he wanted really was out West after all. And more than half of it hidden in Josiah’s canvas pants. 

He’d had an inkling, the same tingle in his palms he feels when he spots a mark. It’s still a surprise, the way their bodies fit together, the way Josiah whispers that he’s beautiful in a way that makes him sound cared for instead of lusted over. 

But then again, Josiah has always managed to surprise him, the combination of faith and brutality, the way he’d pulled Ezra back under cover while saying he ought to let him get shot for whining over a lost diamond in a gunfight. 

He knows he doesn’t deserve Josiah’s tenderness. He also knows he doesn’t care. He’s here and he’s used to taking. 

It still doesn’t explain why his eyes well up with tears, Josiah deep in him like the best kind of ache. 

He’s hardly shiny and new. Josiah stills and Ezra wants to kill him for it, for the way he breathes on Ezra’s cheeks, gentling him like a horse, like a  _ child _ , like doesn’t lust for Ezra right back. He’s clenched around the proof. 

Ezra finds it too hard to hold on to the rage when he moves again; stroking him deep inside, the sensation so profound he doesn’t really have a name for it. 

Not any that come close to how it feels, anyway, and Ezra is very proud of his expansive vocabulary. Of course, Josiah manages to reduce him to only a few words, mostly variations on “more”. 

It is enough to forgive him, though maybe not enough to admit that. 

Still, Josiah can hardly mistake the road map of his body, the arch and snap of his spine as he comes, nails digging into the stone hard muscles of Josiah’s back like pickaxes.

The room smells enough like earth and iron that maybe he really does claw deep enough draw blood. It makes him oddly proud.

Like with every gamble since he’s been one of the Seven, it has paid off and then some. Even in ways he did not expect. 

For a moment, he has to swallow down the urge to tell Josiah his name hasn’t always been Ezra. He’s never wanted to do that. Until then, he hadn’t even realized that Josiah probably already knows. And did this with him anyway. 

It’s enough to make him stir where he’s been dozing under the warm slab of Josiah’s chest. 

He has lingered too long, he fears, and not just in the bed. Glorified cot, really, not a place for him. 

That does not make it easy to leverage himself up and out of the comfort he’s found. 

Especially when Josiah’s massive, calloused hands lock on his shoulders, just for a moment. It’s enough for a coolly scaled snake of fear to curl deep in Ezra’s gut, leaving him disturbingly clear eyed.

But Josiah’s just being kind, showing sentiment as he moves up and off, out of Ezra’s way, not anything else. That’s not who he is. Ezra’s instincts have not failed him in this yet. It still shakes him.

Ezra manages to swing his feet to the floor and freezes. The wooden floorboards are icebox cold now. And his clothes scattered all over them. 

“You leaving?” Josiah rumbles behind him. He can hear the struggle to sound neutral. 

“I believe I ought to” he says. He hadn’t been sure whether to bookend the statement with Josiah or Mr. Sanchez. Either could cause offence, and he is so very vulnerable right now. 

“It’s still raining” Josiah says, reaching out just one rough fingertip towards the naked small of Ezra’s back.

The space between their skin burns and Ezra  _ aches  _ in ways more than physical. From the pounding on the roof, like spilling nails, it is, in fact, still pouring.

“That seems to be so, but I suppose that I have reached the upper limit of a sinner’s welcome in a holy house,” he says, staring at his toes, too pale and skinny, like starving worms, on the dark wood. 

“A sinner is always welcome, even more so than a pious man. He needs it less” Josiah says, rumpling the sheets as he moves his legs to bracket Ezra’s. Their skin is touching now, sweet and warm, but Ezra is not trapped. 

“An interesting theological proposition, but I do believe we’re a bit beyond the pale now,” he says, putting his palms flat on Josiah’s thighs to push himself up. 

He cannot help but let them linger, fingers fascinated by the strength in them, the sparse hair on the coarse skin. Josiah’s hands come up too, hesitating like tired birds, just skimming the edges of Ezra’s. 

It’s enough to get him moving, dressing with the quiet efficiency of a man that has had to quickly evacuate more than one dark bedroom. After a moment, Josiah slowly follows suit.

The empty main space of the would-be church seems oddly desolate now, the light through the windows a powder blue from the rain and dying sun. And the cold.

It makes it hard to pick up his cards, scattered around where they sat. When he’s done, Ezra stands at the door, hesitating and not sure why. 

Carved into the wood, there are a pair of ascending angels. "Stay a while. Keep me company," Josiah says, quiet, looking at his feet.

Not scared, exactly, but somewhere near. But not begging, either. He would hate that more. 

“Well" Ezra says putting extra drag into his drawl. As always, he opts for doing what he feels like. What his gut says. It’s screaming at him now. 

"Wouldn't do to ruin my nice clothes in all this wet" he finishes, like he's making a concession, like he's being magnanimous. Pretending you are is halfway to being, after all. And it's one of the best ways to get what you want. 

Josiah nods, serious. Ezra's not sure he could have taken pleased. 

He pulls the cards back out from his pocket, fingers already cutting and putting them back together. It’s as easy as breathing. Routine. And soothing. He knows where he's standing. 

"I'll deal," he says, as if it was ever in doubt. 

This time, Josiah smiles: "That I can live with". 

**Author's Note:**

> Title shamelessly stolen from [Elmore Leonard’s _Karen Makes Out_](https://www.recordedbooks.com/title-details/9781464022586) which has the same general vibe. You probably don’t care about this but being me, I made sure that [“cotillion”](https://www.southernliving.com/culture/debutante-cotillion), [“put up or shut up”](https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/198682/what-is-the-origin-and-sense-of-the-phrase-put-up-or-shut-up), [“canvas pants”](https://www.historicalemporium.com/how-to-dress-old-west-men.php), [“icebox”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icebox) and [“beyond the pale”](https://www.cntraveler.com/story/what-beyond-the-pale-actually-means) were all a thing in the time this would be set in.


End file.
